


Midwinter graces

by lotesse



Category: Chronicles of Prydain - Lloyd Alexander
Genre: Gen, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2019-02-26 08:40:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13232112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: The longest night of the year swings over Prydain. Set betweenThe Book of ThreeandThe Black Cauldron.





	Midwinter graces

**Author's Note:**

> For Danny.

_King Eiddileg’s realm was buried deep in bustle, as deep as was Prydain in the winter’s snow. The solstice was approaching, and there was all sorts of to-do; performances to be coordinated, rituals to be observed, ingredients to be collected. And was anyone else helpful in accomplishing these essential tasks? No, Eiddileg had to shoulder the responsibility single-handed. It was always so._

_To add insult to injury, his usual porter for the holiday season, the stout dwarf Doli, had gained the gift of invisibility over the past year, which meant he was out harvesting unicorn hair with the other invisibles. Thus, not only was Eiddileg single-handed, even worse! He’d been deprived of his hands._

*

The evening before the solstice ended in storm and chill at Caer Dallben, inside as well as out. The day had gone better than most, at least to begin with - after an extended string of disgraces, Gurgi had at last distinguished himself in a blaze of glory, successfully completing each and every chore that Coll had attempted to teach him on the farm before the farmer had risen from his bed. After Coll had discovered the effort, and approved of the results, Gurgi had been invited to the table to share breakfast, a privilege that had previously evaded him.

The shaggy creature had been well pleased by his new-found access to crunchings and munchings, and the mid-morning rang with his off-key chanted songs. But by the afternoon, clouds were gathering, and the storm broke later that day. The Princess Eilonwy had taken a silver bowl from Dallben’s workshop, while she'd been cleaning, without asking the enchanter’s permission; that afternoon he had missed it, and called the household together for questioning, on which the truth had come out, with some admitted twisting and griping on the girl’s part.

“I’m sorry I didn’t realize I needed to ask every time I need to use some little thing,” she said, her voice piping high and shrill, with an edge to it that made Taran’s feet nervous. 

“Little girls use their manners; wicked creatures disturb things that do not belong to them without care for the rights of others.”

“I am not answerable to you in my doings!”

At that, Dallben had drawn himself up on his dignity, a thing that he rarely did – and, in Taran’s experience, a thing that he never did to any good consequence. “Princess, while it is true that you are not my legal fosterling, the bonds of hospitality demand that you respect my home while it has been opened to you in sanctuary – an arrangement that, please note, I am in no way obligated to continue. You are a disruptive element; perhaps too disruptive to be risked.”

Eilonwy was pale. “Please don’t turn me out,” she said, her voice coming out high and small; she looked like a child, a sharp contrast to the angry and imperious person she had seemed mere moments ago. The contrast troubled Taran, and the speed with which the gold-haired girl had turned from the one to the other spun his head.

“Apologize,” Dallben commanded her quietly, and she swallowed nodded; “I’m sorry, sir,” she said.

“And?”

“And I will not touch your things without first asking your permission. I am grateful,” she added, looking up, “for my home here. I have no wish to leave.”

“Then you may have to leave off some of your former habits, performed in secret,” Dallben said. He left it at that, and the tension in the household was dissipated slightly as Taran and Coll, freed from the bind of witnessing the confrontation, again moved freely about the cottage, preparing the hearth, the farm, themselves for the long night’s sleep.

Later, after the fires had been banked and the tapers had been lit, in the quiet heavy golden hour between waking work and sleeping rest, Taran crept quietly up the first few rungs of the wooden step-ladder that led to the loft where Eilonwy slept; he was forbidden to enter the girl’s sleeping chamber after dark.

“Eilonwy,” he whispered, funneling his cupped hands toward the top of the stair where the girl lay in the warm dark above him; and a moment later he heard a rustling sound of blankets and straw palleting, and then the girl’s face appeared, lit from below by the glow of her bauble; it gave her a strange and otherworldly aspect, and Taran had to master his doubts before he could manage to ask her, as he had meant to do: “Earlier today … when you took Dallben’s bowl? What were you going to do with it? It seemed like he knew, but you never said! You can’t have meant to sell it, or – or destroy it, so … ”

“I wanted to scry with it,” she told him, honest and straightforward there in the dark. “I wanted to have a look at Achren, to make sure – to make sure she’s not coming after me. Also,” the girl added, with a more defiant jut of her lip, “I was hoping I’d get to see her suffer.”

When Taran did not immediately answer, she added, “You see, you are just like Dallben. You think I am a nasty thing, a witch. Well, perhaps I am a witch; at any rate, I was raised by one. What’s the difference,” she asked, reflectively, “between a witch and an enchantress, do you think?”

It was not that he did not want to answer her question; he could not. Sometimes, he felt like he understood Eilonwy better than anyone he’d ever known – and sometimes she was very strange to him, strange and even a bit frightening. Instead, he replied with a question of his own, trying to get in at the perplexity that had him silenced: “Were you ever going to let on to me, that you’re a princess? The last Princess of Llyr, even?”

Now it was her turn to hesitate and fall quiet, away in the darkness.

“No,” she admitted at last.

“No? You meant to lie to me, and continue lying? For how long?”

“Forever, if need be,” she shot back, short and sharp. Then she drew a breath, and went on in a more level tone, “I didn’t want anyone to know. I’d thought … I hoped that if I told no-one, and got away from Spiral Castle, I might manage a clean break from it all. It’s because of what you said, ‘last Princess of Llyr,’ that they all look at me the way they do, take an interest the way they do. If I’d been born some girl of no account, Achren would never have bothered with me – and maybe then Dallben wouldn’t treat me like a snake he wasn’t sure wasn’t poison.”

It stopped him short; he had not thought that she might have her own reasons for wanting the secret kept, focused as he had been on the implied slight of the confidence withheld. But she hadn’t just been lying to him …. She had been trying to start again, and Gwydion hadn’t let her get away with it. As Dallben’s student, Taran was very, very familiar with how frustrating that could be. 

His anger uncoiled and was gone, leaving only open-hearted concern for the girl that he had come to care for for her own qualities and not her long name.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t realize.”

“Hmph. I’m sure you didn’t.”

“No, really,” Taran said. “You see, I don’t know anything about who I am, or who my parents were – and sometimes I have hoped against hope that they might be of noble blood, all unknown. So finding out that you’re someone special – that’s a dream for me. I didn’t understand that you might not feel the same way about it. I’m sorry.”

“All right,” she relented. “Anyway, I’m away from all that, now. You didn’t tell me enough about Coll, you know, not by half. He’s splendid. He’s going to show me how to muck out the byre sometime, he promised me. I think I shall get fantastically dirty.”

“He’ll dunk you in the rainwater hogshead, then,” Taran warned her, “once he’s broken the ice over the top!”

“He never will,” Eilonwy said smugly. “Princesses get baths. He’ll take us with him into the forest tomorrow, if we ask, and Hen can look for acorns. We won’t get dirty that way, only our feet might get wet.”

Whatever crisis had been on her, it seemed to have passed; and Taran, tired with the late hour, wisely declined to get himself further tangled in the girl’s contradictions. He slipped back down to the cold ground, and then hurried to reach for the warmth of his blankets. Curling into his bed, he found heavy sleep there waiting for him; he was already on the edge of dreaming when he managed to call out, somewhat indistinctly, “G’night, Princess. Eilonwy.”

The reply came back, swift and fierce, “Good night, Taran of Caer Dallben. Happy Solstice!” 

Her bauble winked at him through the slats of the floor, once, twice, and then the dark closed in on them, wrapping the children in the same heavy night that encompassed all the creatures of the little farm, man and child, bird and beast.

*

The point of the solstice swing would come in the small hours of the night that year. In the great firelit hall of Caer Cadarn, Fflewddur Flam welcomed it in all awake, singing and drinking with his friend the red-beaded king. 

There was roast boar and venison, it being the season of the hunt, and Smoit's subjects being loyal sorts that had enough to spare a gesture for their lord; as well as casks of mead and wine, jellies and jams and rolls and honeyed ham and thick cream, wheels of nutty cheese and baskets of roasted nuts; and the bard and the king made plenty of noise between the two of them in slurping and in singing. But as the great oak logs in the fireplace burned down to embers and the night drew in, Smoit turned to his old friend with serious eyes, and Fflewddur put out a palm to still his harp. 

“I am glad you are come in this season, harper,” the king said. “My halls are too quiet without you. This should be a season for joyous human noise. Girls should be singing, children should be laughing! But, alas, there are no children here, and with the death of my Maeve there likely never will be. A cold peace, it is, that I have bought for my cantrev with the might of my arm.”

A few wandering notes rose from the harp. “The fire will see us through the cold,” Fflewddur said gently. “We are not burned out yet, old friend. Keep dry your heart’s tinder, and we’ll see sparks from you yet.”

“Perhaps,” Smoit replied. “But time passes, and flame consumes a fuel.”

“Consume your fuel, then, and take a sup of wine, and sing with me. A Fflam is hopeful, but sometimes a round is needed to pull you up out of a dark mood.” And, it may be noted, the strings of the true harp did not tense as he spoke.

The two men raised their voices together, Fflewddur pounding out an insistent rhythm with a booted foot against an emptied cask as an accompaniment to their music; and the darkest hours of the long solstice night passed, and the servants began moving about in the pre-dawn grey, strewing fresh rushes and cleaning the ashes out of the great stone fireplaces.

*

_As the solstice dawn broke over the white peaks of the mountains, in Caer Dathyl a chant went up from the Hall of Bards:_

_Hail the fertile darkness of the North, life and light is reborn!_  
_Hail the gentle breath of the East, life and light is reborn!_  
_Hail the rekindled spark of the South, life and light is reborn!_  
_Hail the trickling drop of the West, life and light is reborn!_

__

__

_All night a fire of oak and holly had burned bright in a brazier in the center of the hall, and as the yellow sun came rising up through the red embers, lifted into the sky by the winding smoke, the words also went up from those who were assembled together to witness the birth of the new year, the bards and astronomers who had sat in assembled vigil through the year’s longest night, “Hail to those who lived before us, hail to those who follow us! All who turn on the turning wheel, guide us with the returning light.”_


End file.
